You Are Not So Smart

The problem with sorting out failures and successes is that failures are often muted, destroyed, or somehow removed from sight while successes are left behind, weighting your decisions and perceptions, tilting your view of the world. That means to be successful you must learn how to seek out what is missing. You must learn what not to do. Unfortunately, survivorship bias stands between you and the epiphanies you seek.To learn how to combat this pernicious bias, we explore the story of Abraham Wald and the Department of War Math founded during World War II.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Our guest in this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast is psychologist Laurie Santos who heads the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at Yale University. In that lab, she and her colleagues are exploring the fact that when two species share a relative on the evolutionary family tree, not only do they share similar physical features, but they also share similar behaviors. Psychologists and other scientists have used animals to study humans for a very long time, but Santos and her colleagues have taken it a step further by choosing to focus on a closer relation, the capuchin monkey; that way they could investigate subtler, more complex aspects of human decision making – like cognitive biases.One of her most fascinating lines of research has come from training monkeys how to use money. That by itself is worthy of a jaw drop or two. Yes, monkeys can be taught how to trade tokens for food, and for years, Santos has observed capuchin monkeys attempting to solve the same sort of financial problems humans have attempted in prior experiments, and what Santos and others have discovered is pretty amazing. Monkeys and humans seem to be prone to the same biases, and when it comes to money, they make the same kinds of mistakes.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Matthew Fisher, a fifth-year grad student at Yale’s Cognition and Development Lab, dives into the intriguing effects of our internet usage on perception and memory. He reveals how easy access to search engines can inflate our sense of knowledge, making us believe we know more than we truly do. The discussion extends to collective knowledge and its implications on self-assessment of understanding, highlighting the cognitive biases we face. Fisher also touches on the paradox of social media's influence on stress, particularly among teenagers.

In psychology, they call it naive realism, the tendency to believe that the other side is wrong simply because they are misinformed.According to Lee Ross, co-author of the new book, The Wisest One in the Room, naive realism has three tenets. One, you tend to believe that you arrived at your political opinions after careful, rational analysis through unmediated thoughts and perceptions. Two, since you are extremely careful and devoted to sticking to the facts and thus free from bias and impervious to persuasion, anyone else who has read the things you have read or seen the things you have seen will naturally see things your way, given that they’ve pondered the matter as thoughtfully as you have. And three, if anyone does disagree with your political opinions it must be because they simply don’t have all the facts yet.Since this is the default position most humans take when processing a political opinion, when confronted with people who disagree, you tend to assume there must be a rational explanation. Usually, that explanation is that the other side is either lazy or stupid or corrupted by some nefarious information-scrambling entity like cable news, a blowhard pundit, a charming pastor or a lack thereof.Ross and Ward concluded that naive realism leads people to approach political arguments with the confidence that “rational open-minded discourse” will naturally lead to a rapid narrowing of disagreement, but that confidence usually short lived. Instead, they say our “repeated attempts at dialogue with those on the ‘other side’ of a contentious issue make us aware that they rarely yield to our attempts at enlightenment; nor do they yield to the efforts of articulate, fair-minded spokespersons who share our views.” In other words, it’s naive to think evidence presented from the sources you trust will sway your opponents because when they do the same, it never sways you.Listen in this episode as legendary psychologist Lee Ross explains how to identify, avoid, and combat this most pernicious of cognitive mistakes.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

You have the power to wield neuroplasticity to your advantage.Just as you can change your body at the atomic level by lifting weights, you can willfully alter your brain by...thinking in a certain way. In this episode we explore using your brain to change your brain at the level of neurons and synapses beyond what is possible through other methods like learning a new language or earning a degree in chemistry. With mindfulness meditation, the evidence seems to suggest that one can achieve a level of change that would be impossible otherwise. The more you attempt to focus, the better you get at focusing on command, and so a real change begins taking place - you slowly become able to think differently, to hold thoughts differently and to dismiss thoughts that before led to attention difficulties or what feels like unwanted thoughts or clutter - and that’s not magical or the result of shaking hands with a deity, it’s biological. Listen as author and meditation teacher Michael Taft explains the benefits of secular, scientific practice of modern mindfulness meditationPatreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this conversation, Robert R. Morris, an MIT-educated scientist and co-founder of Coco, discusses the power of cognitive reframing. He reveals how this psychological tool can help individuals tackle fears and anxieties, especially regarding flying. Through his social network, users can support each other in reframing their thoughts, fostering community and shared wisdom. The talk dives into innovative approaches in mental health, merging technology with psychology to enhance well-being and disrupt harmful cognitive patterns.

Michael Bennett, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist with three decades of experience, teams up with his daughter Sarah, a comedy writer, to discuss the pivotal theme of their book, "Fuck Feelings." They explore the illusion of control and how people often misjudge their ability to influence life events, leading to anxiety and missed opportunities. The conversation delves into the ineffectiveness of traditional therapy approaches, urging listeners to embrace personal limitations and focus on emotional responses. Humor and insightful anecdotes make this enlightening discussion both engaging and relatable.

Is all this new technology improving our thinking or dampening it? Are all these new communication tools turning us into navel-gazing human/brand hybrids, or are we developing a new set of senses that allow us to benefit from never severing contact with the people most important to us?That's the topic of this episode of the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, and to answer these questions we welcome this episode's guest, Clive Thompson, who is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. As the title suggests, he disagrees with the naysayers, and his book is an impressive investigation into why they are probably (thankfully) wrong.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Psychologist Robert D. Laird discusses PTSD post-Katrina, exploring triggers, symptoms, and combatting effects. Personal anecdotes on enduring fear and helplessness from natural disasters are shared. Strategies for managing PTSD triggers, like exposure therapy and social support, are highlighted.

Before we had names for them or a science to study them, the people who could claim the most expertise on biases, fallacies, heuristics and all the other quirks of human reasoning and perception were scam artists, con artists, and magicians. On this episode, magician and scam expert Brian Brushwood explains why people fall for scams of all sizes, how to avoid them, and why most magicians can spot a fraudster a mile away.Patreon: http://patreon.com/youarenotsosmart Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.